More than 750 pixels per port on Baldrick Board

[Road To Bethlehem]

I bought a couple of Baldrick Boards from Hanson Electronics. I can get them to work in some basic configurations, but nothing too advanced.

My scenario is a large number of pixels that slowly change. So a low frame rate is not a problem. Also I need to drive 1,000 pixels per port.

Firstly, the Baldrick Board manual says in relation to the Port Configuration, that one "should never have to play with this section." However, unless I create models with pixels, I get no output from xLights, and the test mode in the Baldrick Board web interface also gives no output. Am I missing something?

The Baldrick8 Introduction page states that the board has "an inbuilt test mode which gives a full colour wash to 2000 pixels just by long pressing the onboard buttons." Again, without defining models and pixels this doesn't work, and certainly doesn't illuminate up to 2000 pixels.

The problem with manually setting models and pixels is that I can only set a maximum of 750 pixels per port through the web interface.

Secondly, if I create a single straight line of 1,000 pixels in xLights (whether or not I have models and pixels defined), I get an error when visualising the controller which says: "Pixel port 1 has 1000 nodes allocated but maximum is 750"

How can I get the Baldrick Board to address 1000 pixels?

 

[AAH]

You'll have to hit up @domhodgson and the ILightThat crew. Initially the Baldrick was DDP only and could be configured to have up to 2000 pixels at 25fps. Requests got made to have E1.31 supported and I think that and other changes meant that the 2000 pixels per port couldn't be processed at the 25fps frame rate. I think somewhere along the line the change got made to lock the maximum number of pixels to 750 per port rather than have some sort of variable number depending on fps and protocol.

 

[domhodgson]

Yep @AAH is right, that 2000 pixel bit got completely missed from the docs and should have been removed a long time ago, that's my fault.

At the moment the 750 is a hard limit for the board and will be at least for this season (we are in a seasonal release freeze at the moment).

As a small team creating a budget controller, we have to pick and choose what we can support and the frame rate as you get more pixels is so variable, we've had to made the decision (at least for now) to make it a hard cap.

I've removed that paragraph (I'd gotten rid of it everywhere else) and again my apologies

 

[Road To Bethlehem]

Thanks guys for your replies. No stress. I will do some redesign and put in an order for another 2 boards.

 

[domhodgson]

Thanks guys for your replies. No stress. I will do some redesign and put in an order for another 2 boards.

With responses like that, I should make these kinda mistakes more often